Reflections on this weekend

Snowpocalypse 2k16

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Maybe it’s because I’m from the North, or maybe it’s because I’m a crotchety old fart at 21, but I enjoy looking at snow more than playing in it. That is partially because I’m woefully underprepared to go trekking around in the stuff. I didn’t bring much cold weather gear from home. In the early fall, I was subsisting on about three pairs of pants for the entire week. The other part of it is that I don’t enjoy the feeling of wet clothes. Apparently it has everything to do with clothes. Suppose that’s kind of shallow of me, but the point is that I will admire all of the snowmen and sledding and other winter activities from afar.

Good Things about Snow Bad Things about Snow
It’s pretty Cold
Soft Wet
You can make things out of it, like snowmen It melts and leave behind mud and dead grass

Now what I did do that has been delayed for far too long was go to the grocery store…the day after the big rush before the storm. Surprisingly they still had plenty of milk and some bread, though the $1 sale shelf stocked with white bread in the front was nearly empty when I arrived. Still, it was a pretty good haul. My boyfriend and I intended to make sausage spaghetti, but that plan fell through and our dinner ended up consisting of:

  • Chips and hummus
  • Pepperoni
  • A milkshake from Cookout

That’s college.

Thoughts on HTML and Liu Reading

HTML

Confession time. I’m a former computer science major, now minor. That said, I’m only an average programmer at best, but I did spend a lot of time messing with BBCode in my middle school/early high school years (thanks, GaiaOnline).

I had to turn the WYSIWYG editor off on WordPress because switching to it ate my code and I couldn’t find a proper solution online, but from what I know about using a WYSIWYG editor on other sites, the main difference between that and a text editor is that the WYSIWYG editor is programmed to do the coding for you with some button pushing and an input or two from the user without explaining to you what’s going on behind the scenes. This can really save some time and you don’t have to know much about coding to use a WYSIWYG editor, so it makes posting and using computers accessible to many people. However, your tools will be limited to what the person who programmed the editor gave you to work with.

With a plain text editor, you’re allowed more freedom to customize your content as you’d like, assuming you know enough HTML to do so, but on the downside, there’s a larger room for error as it’s up to you to make sure that you close all of your tags and use the syntax properly.

Liu Connection

Without CSS or stylesheets, HTML presents itself as plain text with some modifications here and there (for example, headings). It’s pretty barebones. Texts, on the other hand, often have decorations, ornamentation, or other stylized elements to them for various reasons. Commercial fiction, for example, might add such things in order to attract readers. Thus when we encode documents in plain HTML, we cut out all of the extra information and are left with only the content of the work to deal with, like Liu said. Only Revolutions, for example, is a pretty heavily stylized book. Text is resized, three stories are contained on the same page (Hailey, Sam, and the timeline), and the story is told in multiple ways depending on how you read it. Encoding the book would be helpful if we want to focus solely on the content of the words and not the way that they’re presented.